by Dorothy Eden
George, tapping his riding crop against his leg, said to Fanny, ‘You’re not having your head turned by this fellow Marsh, too, are you?’
‘I think my head is fairly securely attached.’
‘Mamma and Amelia are behaving as if they had never seen a man from the city before. He must be laughing at them.’ George’s eyes, with their look of feverish excitement, were on Fanny with the intensity she was beginning to dread. ‘You won’t let him laugh at you, will you?’
‘I don’t suppose he’s laughing at anybody.’
‘I saw you looking at him yesterday. Don’t do it again, Fanny.’ His voice was very soft. ‘I don’t care for you to look at another man.’
‘Oh, George, leave me alone! I can’t bear this possessive attitude of yours. It’s suffocating me. You used to tease me and despise me. Be like that again. Please!’
‘Never!’ said George. ‘Never!’
‘You will be when you are well.’
‘I love you, Fanny. Being well won’t change that.’
Fanny was near to tears with exasperation and tiredness and strain.
‘Then if you must love me, you must. But please don’t persecute me, or I’ll have to tell your father.’
An indescribably sly look came into George’s eyes.
‘That wouldn’t be much use, you know. Not poor old Papa.’
Then he turned and left her, the once handsome young lieutenant of the 27th lancers, who had flirted shamelessly with every pretty girl, a shambling young man whose once immaculate clothing was now always a little untidy, and whose breath frequently carried the fumes of brandy.
George was a tragedy. But how long could one have patience and forbearance with that kind of tragedy! How long was it safe to do so? Fanny couldn’t help thinking constantly of Ching Mei’s death and the convenient way in which it had been blamed on the escaped prisoner. Had anyone else seen George in the garden that night? Uncle Edgar? For why had George begun to speak of his father with pitying contempt? Poor old Papa…
It didn’t seem, after all, as if Adam Marsh were laughing at Amelia with her transparent admiration for him. For he invited her to accompany him to look over the property, Heronshall. They went on horseback across the moors. Amelia rode almost as well as George did. On her mare, Jinny, she lost her dumpiness and her coquettish flutterings, and was a figure worth watching. They made a fine pair as they rode away. Fanny could scarcely bear to watch them go.
There was a shuffling sound behind her.
‘A well-matched pair,’ said Lady Arabella’s throaty voice. ‘Don’t you agree?’
‘Amelia scarcely comes to his shoulder.’
‘She is on a level with his heart. That used to be the thing in my young days. Don’t girls have these romantic notions nowadays?’
‘You know that Amelia has her head stuffed with romantic dreams,’ Fanny said irritably.
‘And you? You’re too practical for such things?’
Fanny turned away.
‘You know I am not,’ she said in a low voice, as if the words were forced from her.
Lady Arabella patted her hand.
‘Your turn will come, my dear. Don’t despair.’
Fanny snatched her hand away. She found the old lady’s kindness more intolerable than her sarcasm. How could she not despair when Amelia and Adam rode through the honeyed sweetness of the moorland air, talking perhaps intimately, perhaps touching hands. It was no use to wonder what Adam Marsh saw in an empty-headed rattle like Amelia. He would discover that she had beautiful small white hands, that her yellow curls blew across her throat when disordered by the wind. A man didn’t then seek for a high intelligence.
They arrived back late in the afternoon. Amelia came flying upstairs calling, ‘Fanny! Mr Marsh has things for the children. Are they well enough to see him? Oh, and you should have seen that divine house. Mr Farquarson’s things are gone and the rooms are empty, but one can imagine exactly what is needed. Mr Marsh has a fine Arabian carpet which he says will perfectly fit the drawing room. The staircase must have portraits on either side. It is so light and airy compared with all the dark stairways in this house. And the master bedroom has the most beautiful views across the moors.’
‘Did you furnish that, too?’
‘Fanny! What a thing to say. We merely discussed what could be done. And it was all perfectly respectable as Mr Farquarson’s housekeeper was still there. Mamma naturally wouldn’t have let me go otherwise. Then is Mr Marsh to come up?’
Fanny wanted to refuse to have Adam in the nursery, but it would give the children pleasure. She said he might come for five minutes, no more.
The wind had raised a glow in his sallow skin. Although he was smiling he looked strangely serious. He had brought gingerbread cookies, bought from old Mrs Potter in the village that morning.
‘For the invalids,’ he said. ‘I hope they are recovering fast. You see, Mrs Potter gave the gingerbread men spots too.’
The children studied the figures liberally sprinkled with coloured sugar, and laughed with delight.
‘Marcus got the measles first, Mr Marsh, but I had the most spots,’ Nolly declared.
‘I had the most spots,’ Marcus said.
‘You did not, Cousin Fanny said I had more. And anyway my gingerbread man has more spots than yours.’
‘No, it hasn’t. Mine has.’
‘Then count them. Come over here and I’ll teach you to count.’
While they were wrangling, Adam turned to Fanny.
‘Miss Amelia has been telling me a great deal about you.’
‘About me!’ Fanny exclaimed in astonishment. She could scarcely believe that they could find nothing to talk of but her on that long ride across the moors. She couldn’t prevent a dimple appearing momentarily in her cheek.
‘Amelia usually finds herself the most absorbing subject.’
‘Perhaps it was because I asked her questions.’
‘What kind of questions?’ Fanny’s face had gone still.
‘Why, how you came to be in this position.’
‘Yes, I suppose you must find it rather different than what you imagined it to be when we met in London.’
‘Amelia tells me your parents died when you were very young. Your mother—your father—tell me what you know about them.’
‘I know so little. My father died of a consumption. He had artistic leanings, I believe. I can’t remember him at all.’ Fanny frowned, feeling the old familiar bafflement. ‘My mother was Irish, of landed but poor gentry, Uncle Edgar has told me. Her name was Francesca, like mine. I try to imagine what she was like, but I know so little. I feel as if I had dropped from the sky. What I do know,’ she finished briskly, ‘is that poor Papa’s illness took all his money. That’s why he left me in my uncle’s care. To be quite accurate, Uncle Edgar isn’t my uncle, but a second cousin.’
She realised, all at once, his interest and was startled and a little disturbed.
‘Why do you ask me these things?’
‘I have an inquisitive bent,’ he said pleasantly.
Fanny frowned again. ‘I think I find your inquisitive bent, as you call it, a little presumptuous. So now you know without any doubts that I am a poor relation. Have you some better position to offer me?’
‘Cousin Fanny, Cousin Fanny! Marcus has eaten all his gingerbread.’
Nolly’s imperative voice broke in on their small duel. For duel it was and Adam seemed to welcome the interruption. He went over to sit on Nolly’s bed.
‘When you are quite recovered how would you like a picnic on the moors? We could take a hamper. Have you seen the moorland ponies? They will come for crusts of bread.’
‘Sandwiches like we eat?’ Nolly asked.
‘Yes, indeed. They have cultivated tastes. But they all need a brush and comb taken to their manes and coats.’
Nolly laughed delightedly. Marcus clamoured, ‘Me, too. Can I come, too.’
‘Naturally. And Cousin Fanny, of course.
One day when the sun shines.’
He had a way of making people adore him, Fanny was thinking coldly. Not only children, but adults, like Amelia. Even Aunt Louisa. But the strange conversation they had just had had confirmed her suspicions about him. She knew now what he was about.
He was looking at her to see if she shared the children’s enthusiasm about the proposed picnic.
‘If you are disappointed I am not an heiress, I am sorry,’ she said. ‘I am afraid no amount of conjecture can achieve that.’ She wanted to go on and say that he would have to be satisfied with Amelia, a compromise that didn’t seem too displeasing to him.
She wasn’t prepared for his frowning anger.
‘I must have been very clumsy to deserve a remark like that. I assure you—’
But at that moment Amelia came bursting in.
‘Mr Marsh, Mamma insists that you stay to dinner. We’re not going to dress. Say that you will.’
He inclined his head. ‘Your mother is very kind.’
‘Then come downstairs.’ She had taken his arm proprietorially. Miss Ferguson’s patient lessons about etiquette and modesty seemed to have escaped from her flighty little head. ‘I think it’s sweet that you should be so interested in my little cousins,’ Fanny heard her saying as they went. ‘But you mustn’t let them monopolise you.’
That was the moment when Fanny decided he was never to have the satisfaction of knowing what he had done to her.
In spite of Amelia’s lofty decree that because Adam was in riding clothes, no one should dress, Fanny took great pains with her appearance that night. She wore her grey taffeta, old to be sure, but she let the neckline fall as low as possible over her shoulders, and she decided, with deliberation, to wear the sapphire pendant Uncle Edgar had given her. Above all, pity was not the emotion she wanted Adam Marsh to feel for her. She brushed her hair into a state of velvet softness and instead of wearing it in ringlets, as was all the rage, she twisted it low on her neck so that her ears and all of her round white forehead were visible.
She went downstairs late, so late that the gong had gone and everyone was just about to go to the dining room. Everyone looked at her. Aunt Louisa was about to scold when Uncle Edgar saw the sapphire and beamed with pleasure.
‘And very well it looks on that pretty neck,’ he whispered conspiratorially, making sure, nevertheless, that his words were quite audible.
‘I had a fancy to wear it,’ Fanny murmured. ‘Somehow I was feeling happy. The children are recovered, and it’s summer, and everything is so beautiful.’
She looked vaguely out of the window, suggesting that her remark about beauty meant the garden, and the trees heavy with mid-summer leaf. But her lingering gaze went round the room.
‘May I sing to you later, Uncle Edgar. It seems a night for singing, I hardly know why.’
‘You may indeed, my dear.’
‘Fanny has a very pleasant voice, Mr Marsh,’ Aunt Louisa said repressively.
‘It’s more likely we may hear a nightingale if we go out-doors,’ said Amelia. ‘Are you an admirer of the nightingale, Mr Marsh?’
So now he was caught between the two of them. Fanny found herself waiting for his answer with more amusement than pain. The pain would come later, when he strolled in the warm dark scented garden with Amelia, as inevitably he would, while she sang to Uncle Edgar, or Lady Arabella, dozing in her chair, or George with his worshipping eyes—or the uncaring moon.
‘Perhaps if the windows were to be opened, we would hear both nightingales.’
‘Bravo, Mr Marsh! Worthy of a diplomat,’ applauded Lady Arabella.
‘Coward, Mr Marsh!’ Fanny murmured.
Adam’s eyes met hers over Amelia’s ringletted golden head. They had a strange intense glitter that shook all her resolutions and left her silent for the rest of the meal.
But later, half way through a song, when the wind from the open window was causing the candle flames to gutter in their own grease, she realised that he and Amelia had disappeared.
‘Don’t stop, my dear,’ said Uncle Edgar. He was a bulky shadowy figure in the winged chair. ‘But perhaps something a little more gay.’
Fanny’s hands came down on the keys in a jagged discord. She saw that the room was empty except for Lady Arabella sunk, as usual, in her gentle after-dinner slumber, and Uncle Edgar. Even George had not stayed. But George didn’t care for music. He could be forgiven. No one else could.
‘Most songs are sad,’ she said.
‘But not all of them are about death. Although, indeed,’ Uncle Edgar was sipping his second glass of port, ‘we must be practical and realise our ultimate destiny. And that reminds me that now you’re almost twenty-one, Fanny, my dear, you must make a will.’
‘A will! But I have nothing to leave to anybody.’
‘It’s more tidy to do so. After all, where would you have been, as indeed where would Olivia and Marcus have been, if your separate father’s hadn’t left instructions about you. True, you haven’t children. Nor have you a fortune. But you do have a little jewellery, my dear, some of it of a certain value. And your aunt and I intend you shall have more. So one day we’ll draw something up. I’m sorry if I sound morbid. Some people think that by signing a will they hear the nails going into their coffin. George made his before he went to the Crimea, and naturally Amelia will also do so later. My own has been made this thirty years, and look at me! No nails in my coffin.’
Fanny was taken aback, more surprised than repelled.
‘What made you think of such a thing just now?’
‘Your song about death. And seeing you wear that sapphire tonight. You will naturally want to choose your own recipient for that.’
It was ironic, macabre, hilarious, even vaguely flattering, since it indicated she wasn’t completely without possessions. She had come down meaning to be so gay and to steal the evenings into her hands, and this was what happened. She and Uncle Edgar had an absorbing conversation about death!
Amelia and Adam came in just as she was laughing with uninhibited mirth.
‘Whatever is the matter now?’ Amelia demanded. She had been flushed and a little sulky all evening, knowing Fanny’s ability to steal a scene. ‘I only took Adam out to insist that he smell the new red rose William is so proud of, and immediately we go you and Papa start having private jokes.’
‘About mortality,’ said Fanny. ‘A very amusing subject. Although I don’t imagine Ching Mei found it so. I hardly—’ She stopped what she was going to say—what had it been going to be? The wind from the open window was making her shiver violently, to the exclusion of all thought. One of the candles on the piano had blown out. The room seemed too dark, the faces all looked at her too intently.
George and Aunt Louisa had also come back, and, about to ask what was going on, the words had died on their lips. It was a strange petrified moment, without rhyme or reason. Did anyone else but herself perceive that all at once Darkwater had turned treacherously into its haunted state?
Someone walked about here who thought too much about death. Was it the name, Ching Mei, that had brought the silence?
13
AMELIA’S BALL WAS ONLY six weeks away, and Hamish Barlow, the attorney from Shanghai, was due to arrive within a month or so. Everyone seemed to be on edge. Uncle Edgar was probably wondering how he was going to explain Ching Mei’s death to Mr Barlow, and Aunt Louisa was constantly fussing about the arrangements for the ball.
Finally, instead of making frequent journeys to Plymouth, Miss Egham, the dressmaker, had been installed in the house, and Amelia divided her time between fittings, riding on the moors with George, or alone (did she have a rendezvous when she went alone?) and wandering about with a moony look on her face.
Adam Marsh kept his word about the children’s picnic, and Amelia, who hitherto had found Marcus and Nolly little but a nuisance, suddenly discovered that she couldn’t resist so delightful an outing, and was sure that there would be room for her in the pony trap, too.
Fanny thought that Adam looked put out when he met them at the crossroads. But if he had, his ill-humour was gone in a flash, and he was welcoming them all with the news that if they followed the uphill road a little farther he had found a perfect spot, out of the wind. Sheltered by an outcrop of rocks they spread their rugs on the turf and prepared to bask in the sunshine. Amelia had brought her parasol, a frivolous affair of purple lace. She said how fortunate Fanny was to have a complexion that was not harmed by the sun, and could even toss aside her wide-brimmed hat. Her own skin was so delicate it would be burned to a cinder without protection, and with her ball so near Mamma was constantly chiding her about her appearance.
‘It’s a terrible thing to be a woman,’ she said, sighing deeply.
‘It certainly seems a pity to have to sit upright under a parasol on a picnic,’ Adam agreed gravely, and then said that he was taking the children to find some moorland ponies. Perhaps Fanny would care to come, since Amelia had her complexion to protect?
Fanny resisted both the invitation and her desire to laugh. She said that she would busy herself unpacking the luncheon basket. She meant to keep Mr Adam Marsh at arm’s length, and anyway Amelia would look so forlorn if she were left, sitting primly under her parasol, playing at being a lady when all the time she wanted to throw dignity to the winds and romp after the children.
‘I think he was laughing at me,’ Amelia declared indignantly.
‘I sometimes thing he is laughing at us all,’ Fanny said.
‘Why? What is ridiculous about us?’
‘Perhaps I used the wrong word. Perhaps, “examining” would be a better one.’
‘He does ask a great many questions,’ Amelia admitted. ‘He says he is interested in human nature. I wonder, Fanny, if he is a dilettante.’ Amelia’s eyes shone. ‘I confess I would find that irresistible.’
‘Getting your heart broken?’ Fanny asked dryly.
‘Oh, I shouldn’t allow that to happen. But he does make all the other men we know seem dreadfully dull. Do you know,’ she finished in a burst of confidence, ‘it is my ambition this summer to make him fall in love with me. If he isn’t already,’ she added dreamily.
